Labor News From the North and Other Reading

A retirement loophole has permitted hundreds of employees of Florida’s state universities to retire and then go back to their jobs, Paul Fain reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. The practice, which legally allows workers to receive paychecks and pensions simultaneously, has raised eyebrows at a time when the state is slashing university budgets and freezing hiring and enrollment, he writes.
Colleges and universities in British Columbia are preparing for layoffs in response to the government’s surprise announcement that it’s facing a budget shortfall, Macleans reports.
The Johns Hopkins University plans to invest $5-million or more over the next five years in a program devoted to hiring and retaining women and racial minorities, Diverse Issues in Higher Education reports.
Via Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog comes the news that teaching assistants at McGill University, in Montreal, went on strike yesterday. They’re seeking a 41-percent pay hike, according to an article in the university’s student newspaper.
Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Canada, has struck a tentative deal with its faculty association, the Exchange Morning Post reports. If approved, the deal would end the strike by part-time faculty members, librarians, and teaching assistants that started in mid-March.
According to a new hiring report on head coaches in women’s college basketball, a record number of minority candidates — seven African-American coaches, including six women, out of a total of 19 — were hired in 2007-8, Charles Huckabee writes
on the News Blog. Unfortunately, as Paul Hewitt, president of Black Coaches & Administrators, the organization that released the report, notes, that’s hardly cause for celebration since the number of minority women in head-coaching jobs in women’s basketball actually shrank over the last decade, Huckabee writes.
Elsewhere on the News Blog, Robin Wilson reports that the U.S. Department of Labor has concluded its nine-year investigation of gender discrimination at Stanford University, not because there wasn’t any but because 11 of the 16 female faculty members and researchers who had originally filed the complaint in 1999 had withdrawn from it, in some cases because they had reached outside settlements with the university. See an article in the San Francisco Chronicle for more details.
Meanwhile, don’t miss Thomas H. Benton’s latest Careers column, in which he reviews Marc Bousquet’s book, How the University Works, on the deteriorating economic conditions of academic labor.
As expected, New Jersey’s State Assembly approved a bill Monday that would give workers the right to paid leave to look after a newborn or a sick relative, bringing the state closer to becoming the third state in the United States to do so, the Associate Press reports. The bill still needs the approval of Gov. Jon S. Corzine, who has promised to sign it.